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Robert Mueller Indicts Some Russian Trolls: Indictment Scams American People

February 19, 2018

In the first two weeks of February, things looked really bad for the coup being run against the President of the United States. Congress, in the form of the House Intelligence Committee, announced that it would be publishing a series of three memos exposing how the coup was fomented. If the first memo—published on February 2 concerning a deliberate fraud on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court by former FBI Director James Comey, former Deputy Attorney Sally Yates, and others—is any guide, criminal investigation of the Obama White House is on the agenda.

The House Intelligence Committee, backed by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has announced that two upcoming memos will expose the role of key State Department personnel and Obama’s intelligence chiefs, respectively, in the coup. The track being followed by Congressional investigators is centered on the use of a very dirty dossier about Donald Trump produced by British intelligence agent Christopher Steele as part of a full-spectrum British/Obama information warfare operation designed to defeat Trump in the 2016 election. Failing that, the British and Obama set out to poison Trump’s presidency and impeach him.

Senators Chuck Grassley and Lindsay Graham had already referred Steele to the U.S. Department of Justice for criminal prosecution. Something, clearly, had to be done to turn the tables or, at least, slow the charge. Something had to be done to take the focus away from the actual British criminals and their U.S. co-conspirators and refurbish the increasingly discredited Russiagate myth. Enter the ever dutiful Robert Mueller III and his flimsy new indictment. On February 15, Mueller’s grand jury in Washington indicted 13 Russians and three Russian companies for a social media campaign which the indictment alleges sought to sow “discord” in the United States during the period of the 2016 presidential elections and their immediate aftermath.

A few things are of note just on the surface of this case. The indictment, written and formulated like a press release rather than a legal document, will never have its factual basis challenged in court. Mueller knows this. The U.S. has no extradition treaty with Russia and Russia most certainly will not turn these defendants over to Mueller. According to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the Russians fooled the Trump campaign by pretending to be Americans based on stealing the identities of Americans. There is no allegation of “collusion” with the Trump campaign.

There is no claim that this operation affected the vote in the Presidential election, nor could there be, as the expenditures alleged for this amateurish hit-or-miss social media operation were completely dwarfed, by huge orders of magnitude, by the expenditures made by Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Bernie Sanders, and by associated PACs and organizations.

But, oh those evil Russian “bad actors” who “meddled” in an American election, as even the President initially tweeted. As we have repeatedly warned, the strategic context of the coup against Trump is an all-out effort to preserve the Anglo-American order against what is perceived to be the rising power of China, now allied with Russia. China has constantly and persistently invited the United States to join its Belt and Road Initiative, the largest infrastructure development project ever undertaken in world history. Trump’s reasoned approach to both Russia and China is seen as an existential threat to the continued Anglo-American partnership which has dominated the world since Franklin Roosevelt’s death.

Russiagate’s initial narrative, that Russians hacked the DNC and John Podesta’s email accounts to damage the Clinton campaign and elect Trump, has been discredited by the work of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. William Binney, the former technical director of the NSA, states that if such Russian hacking occurred, the NSA would have the evidence of it and would have found a way to produce it. The VIPS also conducted a scientific experiment strongly supporting their conclusion that the ultimate source of the Wikileaks DNC emails was a leak, not a hack. Now, the emphasis has shifted to another claim made by Obama’s intelligence chiefs in the evidence-free assessment of January 2017: that the Russians ran a social media campaign designed to support Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump and later to roil the extant divisions in American society. This social media campaign was run from an entity called the Internet Research Agency (IRA) in St. Petersburg, Russia, according to the 2017 Obama intelligence assessment and Mueller’s indictment.

William Binney and Ray McGovern of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) speak at an EIR event in NYC, September 9, 2017.

Mueller claims that from 2014 forward the Internet Research Agency, financed by two companies owned by Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin, planned and implemented a campaign to interfere with the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections as part of a project named “translator.” According to Mueller, the campaign involved phony Facebook groups and phony Twitter, Instagram, and email accounts, all run by Russians from the IRA who had stolen six U.S. identities to facilitate the operation. They used Facebook’s paid advertising feature to boost their posts; three IRA employees visited the U.S. under false pretenses to “gather intelligence in 2014”; contacts were made with the Trump campaign’s state offices and field organizations to coordinate social media and set up rallies in 2016 in Washington D.C., New York, Florida, and Pennsylvania. Allegedly, the IRA sought to suppress the black vote by bogus social media posts and also claimed that the election was “rigged” on Clinton’s behalf. After the election, the IRA engaged in the same social media and rally activities to both support Trump and the “Resist” movement seeking Trump’s impeachment. The latter “Not My President” rallies drew major crowds and major media attention. The other putative rallies bombed out with practically zero attendance.

I will leave it to others to document the obvious U.S. hypocrisy concerning the premise of Russiagate. The United States has intervened in elections all over the world, repeatedly, and, as James Woolsey recently said on Fox News, for the “good of those nations.” When someone we don’t like is elected, like Victor Yanukovich in Ukraine, we simply launch a coup using such native assets as Neo-Nazi shock troops (Ukraine) or Al-Qaeda and other Islamic terrorists (Syria). Obama’s White House, in the form of the National Security Council’s Ben Rhodes, claimed that it conducted information warfare operations with finesse, setting up, for example, a media echo chamber to sell the Iran nuclear deal based on the fact that most reporters were “27-year-old kids who knew nothing.”

The indictment’s own overblown allegations should subject it to ridicule. How do we know that Yevgeniy Prigozhin is the boss of this operation? According to Mueller, an IRA employee took a picture of himself in front of the White House close to Prigozhin’s birthday with the sign, “Happy Birthday, Boss.” The indictment shares the astonishing news that the amazing sleuths at the IRA found out the shocking fact from one of their American social media contacts that they should concentrate on “purple states.” The indictment contains an email from one of the allegedly savvy conspirators stating, “We had a slight crisis here at work: the FBI busted our activity (not a joke). So, I got preoccupied with covering tracks together with colleagues… I created all these pictures and posts, and the Americans believed that it was written by their people.” Mueller would have us believe that sophisticated Russian social media trolls put outright confessions of obstruction of justice in their emails. How is it that the Russian 2014 intelligence mission to the U.S. alleged in the indictment had anything to do with the 2016 elections, particularly since Donald Trump had not even announced his candidacy? Despite the IRA’s allegedly broad mandate to disrupt American politics, the only U.S. political campaign they attempted to directly contact and compromise during the actual 2016 election period, according to Mueller, appears to be the campaign of Donald Trump.

The small potatoes and ineffective nature of the “meddling” comes into focus by reference to the Congressional testimonies of social media executives regarding the alleged Russian social media campaign. With respect to Facebook ads, this operation spent $100,000 on Facebook and Instagram ads. The Clinton and Trump campaigns spent a combined total of $81 million. The alleged Russian spending in Wisconsin was $1,979, Michigan $823, and Pennsylvania $300. These were all heavily contested “swing” states in the election. While 44 percent of the ad impressions in Facebook users’ news feeds occurred during the election, 56 percent came after the election. Additionally, 25 percent of the ads were never seen by anyone, and the vast majority didn’t reference the presidential election, voting, or a particular candidate. With respect to organic content in Facebook users’ news feeds, the Russian “linked” accounts cited by Facebook generated 1 out of every 23,000 pieces of content. Facebook was liberal in defining what it considered a Russian-linked account, considering as such any account it could trace to the entire nation of Russia.

The Slimy Rewarmed British Gruel Behind the Indictment

The story of how the IRA came to be an infamous “Putin-controlled troll farm” in the narratives of Western intelligence is an old and long one. We can say, definitively, that it is rewarmed British gruel, a British lie as poisonous as Christopher Steele’s dirty dossier.

At the beginning of 2014, an anti-Russian group of hackers, initially called “The Anonymous International,” and later, “Shaltay-Boltay,” claimed that the building at Saint Petersburg, Savushkina, 55 housed a troll farm run by the Kremlin.1A provocative and detailed account, from an informed perspective, of the Western intelligence links to the Russian troll farm in Mueller’s indictment is provided by “Scott Humor” at the Saker blog: http://thesaker.is/a-brief-history-of-the-kremlin-trolls/ Since then, this building has been photographed and highlighted endlessly by MI6, all of the British press and tabloids, the CIA, the FBI, NATO, the BBC, the State Department’s propaganda departments and NGOs, CNN, and most of the rest of the mainstream American media. Infiltration operations have been run and publicized by the Russian opposition. Actions against the alleged IRA have been filed by infiltrators in the Russian courts. Any intelligent observer would ask the first obvious question: Why, if this building and the alleged company occupying it has been so repeatedly targeted by Western intelligence, and is clearly under intense Western surveillance, would Putin be stupid enough to run an influence operation using it to target the 2016 elections? The answer should be obvious; he did not.

The allegation made by “Anonymous International” was immediately picked up by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the anti-Putin oligarch who collaborates in multiple ways with both British and U.S. intelligence. His Institute for Modern Russia is a major font of U.S. information warfare operations into Russia. The “Anonymous International” allegations were also immediately leaked to BuzzFeed, the same publication used to make the dirty British Steele dossier against Donald Trump a very public document.

A major escalation of British and U.S. information warfare operations against Russia occurred in 2014. According to Politico Magazine, Hillary Clinton freaked out at that time about the inadequacy of Anglo-American operations selling the Ukraine coup. The British, Obama and his CIA and State Department, and their Kiev regime allies, were equally adamant about the necessity to go to war on this front. The joint British-Obama Administration NATO initiative known as the Strategic Communications Service, based in Latvia was activated to “counter” any Russian version of events. The St. Petersburg social media troll farm, at the center of Mueller’s indictment, has been a staple, endlessly photographed, infiltrated, and written about by Western Information Warriors from 2014 forward.

A huge and well funded anti-Putin “information warfare” industry now operates in Washington, D.C., featuring the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, where none other than Dmitri Alperovitch (author of the Russia-hacked-the-DNC hoax) is a fellow; the Alliance for the Defense of Democracy; the German Marshall Fund; the Information Warfare Initiative of the Washington Center for Policy Analysis; the National Endowment for Democracy; and the State Department’s propaganda arms, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Generous funding has been provided by the likes of Khodorkovsky and George Soros. As the result of the National Defense Authorization Act, signed by Obama in 2016, millions of dollars are now flowing into this U.S. information warfare initiative.2https://consortiumnews.com/2018/01/28/unpacking-the-shadowy-outfit-behind-2017s-biggest-fake-news-story/ and the three part series by George Eliason in Consortium News: https://consortiumnews.com/2018/02/11/u-s-intelligence-crisis-poses-a-threat-to-the-world/
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/02/13/how-intel-for-hire-is-undermining-u-s-intelligence-part-2/
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/02/18/a-crisis-in-intelligence-unthinkable-consequences-of-outsourcing-u-s-intel-part-3/ In the 2013 version of the NDAA, the ban on U.S. agencies conducting propaganda wars domestically, that is, targeting U.S. citizens, was lifted by Congress based on the alleged need to deal with homegrown terrorists. All of the entities listed above have been integral to the coup against President Trump.

According to the Saker blog’s account of the IRA,3http://thesaker.is/a-brief-history-of-the-kremlin-trolls the company itself does not exist. It is a fiction created by Shaltay Boltay, the successor to “Anonymous International” in conjunction with western intelligence agencies. Shaltay-Boltay (Russian for “Humpty-Dumpty”) conducted a systematic campaign of hacking, leaking, and extortion against Russian officials, according to accounts of its own activities published in the Guardian. Members of Shaltay Boltay were arrested in November of 2016 together with rogue Russian FSB officers said to control their activities. All were charged with treason by the Russian government, specifically some form of collaboration with the CIA. The British account of this affair, produced in the Guardian of February 9, 2017 claims that the treason charges were based on the hackers and rogue FSB officials having confessed their trolling crimes to the CIA. According to a November 2017, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty Article, the FSB “cyber” division where the arrested officers worked had been in collaboration with U.S. law enforcement agencies for years.

A different account was provided by reporter Andrey Zakharov to the Washington Post on February 18. Zakharov works for the RBK Business Journal owned by Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokorov, and is widely credited by Western intelligence with the “definitive” expose of the Russian troll farm Mueller indicted. Prokorov was heavily involved in the publication of the Panama Papers hack, considered by many to be a prime information warfare escapade against Putin. Zakharov says that Russian opposition groups have been covering the “troll farm” since 2013 and that he is completely “confounded” by Mueller’s indictment.

Reviewing Mueller’s bogus indictment, Zakarhov told the Post: “Well, of all the people mentioned there, only some were the real top managers of the troll farm… The other staff mentioned are very incidental. I mean, it seems like they put down all the names they could get… [m]ost of these guys didn’t work for the troll factory for a long time. They didn’t even work there during the elections. Like Kryvola [claimed in the indictment to have come to the U.S. for intelligence purposes in 2014], she didn’t work there then… A lot of Russian conservatives were proud [of the social media marketing operation]. They said: ‘Look at what Russians can do! Only 90 people with $2 million made America scared! We are strong!’ And for conservative people here, they see that Americans have CNN, Radio Free Europe, etc., that cover Russia. They say, ‘Why can’t we establish groups in America and have our own influence?’”

Zakharov’s entire interview with the Post implies that Mueller’s minions lifted Zakharov’s published work wholesale, combined it with major factual errors, and then spun it, considerably.4 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/02/18/the-russian-journalist-who-helped-uncover-election-meddling-is-confounded-by-the-mueller-indictments/

Meanwhile the So-Called Democrats Impose Wholesale U.S. Censorship

The final ironic twist I will cite about Mueller’s indictment is the fact that the pre-packaged information it has imported from the British, has been and is being used to support wholesale censorship in the United States. On November 30, 2016, an anonymous group called Prop or Not published, in conjunction with the Washington Post, a list of U.S. publications it accused of being Russian propaganda fronts. The list included practically any publication which had doubted the “official” version of events concerning September 11, 2001, the ensuing Iraq war, or the Russiagate myth created by the Clinton Campaign and the Obama Administration. Prop or Not is traceable to the same Information War specialists behind the Russian Troll Farm story at the center of Mueller’s indictment.5https://consortiumnews.com/2018/01/28/unpacking-the-shadowy-outfit-behind-2017s-biggest-fake-news-story/ Facebook, Twitter, all the social media platforms, are now on the lookout to censor dissenting views right out of their platforms, the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States be damned.

This is a product of the McCarthyite hysteria infecting our Congress and literally destroying the mental capacities of many. It is endlessly stoked by the national news media. It is a phenomenon far more dangerous to the national security of the United States than any ham-handed Russian operation to “meddle” in our elections. It is that hysteria and madness which now mistakes Russian puppy postings on Facebook as an attempt to steal the American mind. The late Robert Parry wrote passionately about this in his last days and warned us. It would be a fitting tribute both to him and ourselves if we moved now to finally end this insane British coup.6https://consortiumnews.com/2017/09/28/the-slimy-business-of-russia-gate/
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/11/06/learning-to-love-mccarthyism/